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Hi. I went through this journey myself. I have a CS master degree, and always wanted to transition into AI research (focus on probabilistic programming, deep le

Hi. I went through this journey myself. I have a CS master degree, and always wanted to transition into AI research (focus on probabilistic programming, deep learning and self-play, but also simulation, learning-to-learn, bayesian inference, genetic algorithms). The initial plan was to self-learn machine learning, deep learning and statistics. I did that for 1 year, with the hope of joining on of the big AI labs afterwards. As it's very competitive, I couldn't join one of those labs, and wasn't willing to compromise on that. So I turned to plan B: salvage my ML skills by applying them to crypto trading, and if it works, then I'll have funding to start my own lab. Plan B worked: in 1 year and 2 months, we turned 40k of our own funds into 100M. Today we are a team of 5 and we do $5B of daily volume, around 3% of the global crypto markets. Now the challenge is to start the research division, operate the trading and research in tandem, and create the right incentives: the research converts money into ideas, the trading ideas into money. The research would have two sub-divisions: fundamental and applied to trading. My motivation for the research is mostly curiosity: I want to de-mystify intelligence (natural or artificial) and reverse-engineer it. When you talk about your lab, I resonate a lot with "watch[ing] the beauty of it". The way I would describe my research agenda is the following: put a bunch of phds in a room, see what happens. If that sounds interesting, email me at [redacted]

rexreed 5y ago
Wow, very impressive. What sort of trading yields such mega returns? Is the value in cryptocurrency or has it been realized in actual cash returns?
montenegrohugo 5y ago
You turned 40.000 into 100.000.000? That's incredibly impressive (even with the recent crypto bull run). Was this all achieved with time-series prediction through ML models? I had the impression those were hard to get right, but props to you for clearly doing so.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Everyone's a genius in a bull market :D
- not-a-cat 5y ago
  I think it's both easy and hard, depending how you look at it. Hard because it's a tough ML problem where you have to combat overfitting and the messiness of the real world; easy because crypto is clearly one of the easiest markets to trade and there are opportunities all over the place (compared to equities for example). On top of my head: stat arb, yield arb, exchange arb, funding arb, market making / liquidity providing (CEX/DEX), doing/preventing sandwich attacks, good old yield farming...
- omgwtfbbq 5y ago
  How are people not more skeptical of this. This would without doubt be the most successful trading run in history and we are expected to believe that a self taught HN rando who couldn't even get into an AI lab did this with 5 people in SF?? Renaissance Tech is probably the best hedge fund in the world and they can only manage something like 30% a year but this guy did 250000% in a year and change? Give me a break. If anything they executed a massive pump and dump/rug pull and nothing more. I mean why bother with this so called "research" endeavor when you could be a deci-billionaire in a year or two using the same strategy you've been using and then simply buy OpenAI or whatever. The whole story makes no sense.
___luigi 5y ago
That's impressive. This reminds me of a story I read about being an independent researcher (https://andreas-madsen.medium.com/becoming-an-independent-researcher-and-getting-published-in-iclr-with-spotlight-c93ef0b39b8b https://andreas-madsen.medium.com/becoming-an-independent-re...). For those who want to do the same. When did you start?. How did you start?. What kind of setup did you have?. How did you stay focus?, and for how long did you work on that?. Any failure stories you want to share?.
- not-a-cat 5y ago
  Most of it comes down do conviction and sticking to my not-so-promissing setup for 1 year, while every single of my peers were either thinking WTF are you doing, or telling me why my thing would fail. The rest is luck where we could scale way past what we though was possible. I stayed focused by creating a penalty system where if I worked for less than 7 hours that day, I'd burn 1$ for every missing hour. I still maintain that spreadsheet with the self-debt over time (that I have yet to pay, but I will by burning crypto). Also my screen saver message is "get back to work"
gryn 5y ago
that's really impressive, congrats. for how much of that year and 2 months were you working solo ?
- not-a-cat 5y ago
  I spent 1 year learning about AI/ML with books and moocs. Then 1 year building a prototype. Then 1 year + 2 months as a team.
  - jayrobin 5y ago
    On the subject of moocs and books, which were some of your favorites? I'm an SWE with an out-of-date background in AI and I'd love to deep-dive into ML, but there are _so many_ mooc options nowadays without a great way to determine quality.
  - blaurence5 5y ago
    What about finance, crypto and algo trading? How much time did you spend on those subjects, and what are some good resources?
kordlessagain 5y ago
And now we know how inflated the markets are.
boringg 5y ago
2500x returns in 14 months - that averages to an astounding 178x returns monthly. * If this is true * - it sounds like maybe the best return the markets have ever seen which I would imagine would be the luck of investing at the base of the pandemic and enjoying the inflation since then. [edit]: manners were missing: * if this is true * - congrats on your run and hopefully those research dollars develop some interesting finds.
- tlb 5y ago
  It's actually 1.75x monthly. 1.75^14 == 2500.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Was doing a flat average not compounding.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - texasbigdata 5y ago
    Plus if they used any leverage it's even higher.
moritonal 5y ago
Very impressive and congratulations for playing the game right, but the idea that 3% of all crypto use is from 5 people in SF ratifies a lot of my negative beliefs about the crypto world.
- texasbigdata 5y ago
  Why? A priori there were 5 fewer, they saw an opportunity and entered, and likely more will too, and eventually it will saturate and balance out. Startups providing liquidity can be a good thing.
- ambicapter 5y ago
  As a counterpoint I'd love to see the numbers for fiat stock markets. I assume the big players do ALOT of trading volume relative to the majority.
- boringg 5y ago
  Where did you get SF from? I mean seems like a likely place but I don't think OP said that did they?
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I think 3 and 5 are the problematic variables there, not SF.
  - moritonal 5y ago
    Haha, you know what, I have no idea! It was my mistake, he is in fact french. A quick google of the email leads to "http://tufa.ai/ http://tufa.ai/". Some commented code in the site leads to the quote "“Tufa” is a name for a new word Josh Tenenbaum gives when talking about the idea of learning with few examples" which matches against the blog "https://pinouchon.github.io/ai/machine-learning/2016/03/21/can-your-learning-algotithm-do-tufa-learning.html https://pinouchon.github.io/ai/machine-learning/2016/03/21/c..." which matches against "Benjamin Crouzier" who both wants "To finance a research startup" and is pretty good at dominoes (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7690571/Man-spends-days-building-intricate-structures-thousands-tiny-planks-knock-down.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7690571/Man-spends-...). Their reddit account confirms they've been working in ML and Bitcoin for 3 years. So France, not SF (https://www.f6s.com/tufa https://www.f6s.com/tufa), and appologies @not-a-cat if you considered this a good sock-puppet for @pinouchon.
codekilla 5y ago
I also have tried starting a research institute (eonias.org), and am a member of ronininstitute.org. I’d be happy to have conversations with anyone interested in setting up an institute: grant@eonias.org (my name).
choppaface 5y ago
That’s quite a flex! How do you anticipate disseminating the results of your research group without compromising the highly competitive position of your financial interests? Will you publish papers on toy datasets?
- not-a-cat 5y ago
  Agreed. Good question. Regarding our current approach, my hope is that someday our alpha goes away entirely and we can publish our strategy in detail. But going forward, the plan is to have a trading division that keeps research secret, and a fundamental AI research division (unrelated to trading) that publishes publicly.
antonzabirko 5y ago
That's awesome! What year did you start if you don't mind me asking? Was it around the time btc jumped to 40k?
stickyricky 5y ago
> we turned 40k of our own funds into 100M Yeah... you're full of shit. You didn't turn 40k of your own money into 100m of your own money. You're leaving out a funding round, inheritance, money laundering, or the whole story is just BS from the start.
- Retric 5y ago
  Very likely BS, but it is at least consistent with a prior Who is hiring? post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724326
- noname123 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity, how does one even custody 100M dollars in crypto markets? In equities/traditional trading anything above 8 figures allow you to have prime brokerage access (e.g., Archeogos). For the type of arb trading and yield harvesting OP is referring to (and not throwing shade; just curious), how do you even find any broker or exchange in the crypto space that are willing to custody 100M worth of cash and crypto for long term stat arb, yield harvesting and fund harvesting. Do even the most established crypto exchanges allow you the covered margin to short sell futures and participate in funding harvest and custody the coins for you? I get OP might be just market making across decentralized exchanges. That scares me honestly more. As you are dealing with more exchanges some of which have more security and exit scam risks. Don't get me wrong I def. believe there are opportunities in crypto. Just curious if the infrastructure in place makes the type of trading OP talks about safe and accessible to retail.
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    > how do you even find any broker or exchange in the crypto space that are willing to custody 100M worth You definitely do not put all your eggs in one basket. The mature legal and insurance infrastructure in the fiat markets encourages this kind of all-eggs-in-one-basket in order to get better treatment from your brokers. In crypto the incentive is precisely the opposite. > more exchanges some of which have more security and exit scam risks. That is a very, very important risk that must be mitigated. Doing so is part of what separates success from failure. The residual unmitigatable risk is treated as a cost of doing business. It's still the wild west in many ways. Some people like that. Most people who've spent a lot of time on Wall Street won't.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
ML has proven to have incredibly poor results in crypto trading or market trading in general. There is paper after paper published on the dismal performance of this approach. It seems just very unlikely.
- omgwtfbbq 5y ago
  It's obviously BS. The guy admits he couldn't even get a job at an AI lab with his skills but they were somehow good enough to make a 250000% return in about a year via "algotrading" ? It's ludicrous.
teachingassist 5y ago
> in 1 year and 2 months, we turned 40k of our own funds into 100M. This would be a challenge even if you had perfect foresight. If you had gone all-in on Dogecoin, you would still only have ~5M.
- nimithryn 5y ago
  You have to assume that they also a) levered up and b) were doing some kind of arbitrage, not just HODLing. Color me skeptical but wilder things have been known to happen.
  - teachingassist 5y ago
    I could alternatively assume that you time travelled with a copy of Grays Sports Almanac.
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    I’ve seen some moments of price differences between crypto markets even this year that you could hand-trade for a profit.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
The insane claims, the failure to provide any proof despite the ease of doing so and the email address at the end tells me this is a scam artist fishing for gullible marks.

rexreed 5y ago

Wow, very impressive. What sort of trading yields such mega returns? Is the value in cryptocurrency or has it been realized in actual cash returns?

montenegrohugo 5y ago

You turned 40.000 into 100.000.000? That's incredibly impressive (even with the recent crypto bull run). Was this all achieved with time-series prediction through ML models? I had the impression those were hard to get right, but props to you for clearly doing so.

robertlagrant 5y ago
Everyone's a genius in a bull market :D
not-a-cat 5y ago
I think it's both easy and hard, depending how you look at it. Hard because it's a tough ML problem where you have to combat overfitting and the messiness of the real world; easy because crypto is clearly one of the easiest markets to trade and there are opportunities all over the place (compared to equities for example). On top of my head: stat arb, yield arb, exchange arb, funding arb, market making / liquidity providing (CEX/DEX), doing/preventing sandwich attacks, good old yield farming...
omgwtfbbq 5y ago
How are people not more skeptical of this. This would without doubt be the most successful trading run in history and we are expected to believe that a self taught HN rando who couldn't even get into an AI lab did this with 5 people in SF?? Renaissance Tech is probably the best hedge fund in the world and they can only manage something like 30% a year but this guy did 250000% in a year and change? Give me a break. If anything they executed a massive pump and dump/rug pull and nothing more. I mean why bother with this so called "research" endeavor when you could be a deci-billionaire in a year or two using the same strategy you've been using and then simply buy OpenAI or whatever. The whole story makes no sense.

___luigi 5y ago

That's impressive. This reminds me of a story I read about being an independent researcher (https://andreas-madsen.medium.com/becoming-an-independent-researcher-and-getting-published-in-iclr-with-spotlight-c93ef0b39b8b https://andreas-madsen.medium.com/becoming-an-independent-re...). For those who want to do the same. When did you start?. How did you start?. What kind of setup did you have?. How did you stay focus?, and for how long did you work on that?. Any failure stories you want to share?.

not-a-cat 5y ago
Most of it comes down do conviction and sticking to my not-so-promissing setup for 1 year, while every single of my peers were either thinking WTF are you doing, or telling me why my thing would fail. The rest is luck where we could scale way past what we though was possible. I stayed focused by creating a penalty system where if I worked for less than 7 hours that day, I'd burn 1$ for every missing hour. I still maintain that spreadsheet with the self-debt over time (that I have yet to pay, but I will by burning crypto). Also my screen saver message is "get back to work"

gryn 5y ago

that's really impressive, congrats. for how much of that year and 2 months were you working solo ?

not-a-cat 5y ago
I spent 1 year learning about AI/ML with books and moocs. Then 1 year building a prototype. Then 1 year + 2 months as a team.
- jayrobin 5y ago
  On the subject of moocs and books, which were some of your favorites? I'm an SWE with an out-of-date background in AI and I'd love to deep-dive into ML, but there are _so many_ mooc options nowadays without a great way to determine quality.
- blaurence5 5y ago
  What about finance, crypto and algo trading? How much time did you spend on those subjects, and what are some good resources?

kordlessagain 5y ago

And now we know how inflated the markets are.

boringg 5y ago

2500x returns in 14 months - that averages to an astounding 178x returns monthly. * If this is true * - it sounds like maybe the best return the markets have ever seen which I would imagine would be the luck of investing at the base of the pandemic and enjoying the inflation since then. [edit]: manners were missing: * if this is true * - congrats on your run and hopefully those research dollars develop some interesting finds.

tlb 5y ago
It's actually 1.75x monthly. 1.75^14 == 2500.
- boringg 5y ago
  Was doing a flat average not compounding.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- texasbigdata 5y ago
  Plus if they used any leverage it's even higher.

moritonal 5y ago

Very impressive and congratulations for playing the game right, but the idea that 3% of all crypto use is from 5 people in SF ratifies a lot of my negative beliefs about the crypto world.

texasbigdata 5y ago
Why? A priori there were 5 fewer, they saw an opportunity and entered, and likely more will too, and eventually it will saturate and balance out. Startups providing liquidity can be a good thing.
ambicapter 5y ago
As a counterpoint I'd love to see the numbers for fiat stock markets. I assume the big players do ALOT of trading volume relative to the majority.
boringg 5y ago
Where did you get SF from? I mean seems like a likely place but I don't think OP said that did they?
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I think 3 and 5 are the problematic variables there, not SF.
- moritonal 5y ago
  Haha, you know what, I have no idea! It was my mistake, he is in fact french. A quick google of the email leads to "http://tufa.ai/ http://tufa.ai/". Some commented code in the site leads to the quote "“Tufa” is a name for a new word Josh Tenenbaum gives when talking about the idea of learning with few examples" which matches against the blog "https://pinouchon.github.io/ai/machine-learning/2016/03/21/can-your-learning-algotithm-do-tufa-learning.html https://pinouchon.github.io/ai/machine-learning/2016/03/21/c..." which matches against "Benjamin Crouzier" who both wants "To finance a research startup" and is pretty good at dominoes (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7690571/Man-spends-days-building-intricate-structures-thousands-tiny-planks-knock-down.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7690571/Man-spends-...). Their reddit account confirms they've been working in ML and Bitcoin for 3 years. So France, not SF (https://www.f6s.com/tufa https://www.f6s.com/tufa), and appologies @not-a-cat if you considered this a good sock-puppet for @pinouchon.

codekilla 5y ago

I also have tried starting a research institute (eonias.org), and am a member of ronininstitute.org. I’d be happy to have conversations with anyone interested in setting up an institute: grant@eonias.org (my name).

choppaface 5y ago

That’s quite a flex! How do you anticipate disseminating the results of your research group without compromising the highly competitive position of your financial interests? Will you publish papers on toy datasets?

not-a-cat 5y ago
Agreed. Good question. Regarding our current approach, my hope is that someday our alpha goes away entirely and we can publish our strategy in detail. But going forward, the plan is to have a trading division that keeps research secret, and a fundamental AI research division (unrelated to trading) that publishes publicly.

antonzabirko 5y ago

That's awesome! What year did you start if you don't mind me asking? Was it around the time btc jumped to 40k?

stickyricky 5y ago

> we turned 40k of our own funds into 100M Yeah... you're full of shit. You didn't turn 40k of your own money into 100m of your own money. You're leaving out a funding round, inheritance, money laundering, or the whole story is just BS from the start.

Retric 5y ago
Very likely BS, but it is at least consistent with a prior Who is hiring? post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724326
noname123 5y ago
Just out of curiosity, how does one even custody 100M dollars in crypto markets? In equities/traditional trading anything above 8 figures allow you to have prime brokerage access (e.g., Archeogos). For the type of arb trading and yield harvesting OP is referring to (and not throwing shade; just curious), how do you even find any broker or exchange in the crypto space that are willing to custody 100M worth of cash and crypto for long term stat arb, yield harvesting and fund harvesting. Do even the most established crypto exchanges allow you the covered margin to short sell futures and participate in funding harvest and custody the coins for you? I get OP might be just market making across decentralized exchanges. That scares me honestly more. As you are dealing with more exchanges some of which have more security and exit scam risks. Don't get me wrong I def. believe there are opportunities in crypto. Just curious if the infrastructure in place makes the type of trading OP talks about safe and accessible to retail.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  > how do you even find any broker or exchange in the crypto space that are willing to custody 100M worth You definitely do not put all your eggs in one basket. The mature legal and insurance infrastructure in the fiat markets encourages this kind of all-eggs-in-one-basket in order to get better treatment from your brokers. In crypto the incentive is precisely the opposite. > more exchanges some of which have more security and exit scam risks. That is a very, very important risk that must be mitigated. Doing so is part of what separates success from failure. The residual unmitigatable risk is treated as a cost of doing business. It's still the wild west in many ways. Some people like that. Most people who've spent a lot of time on Wall Street won't.

hungryforcodes 5y ago

ML has proven to have incredibly poor results in crypto trading or market trading in general. There is paper after paper published on the dismal performance of this approach. It seems just very unlikely.

omgwtfbbq 5y ago
It's obviously BS. The guy admits he couldn't even get a job at an AI lab with his skills but they were somehow good enough to make a 250000% return in about a year via "algotrading" ? It's ludicrous.

teachingassist 5y ago

> in 1 year and 2 months, we turned 40k of our own funds into 100M. This would be a challenge even if you had perfect foresight. If you had gone all-in on Dogecoin, you would still only have ~5M.

nimithryn 5y ago
You have to assume that they also a) levered up and b) were doing some kind of arbitrage, not just HODLing. Color me skeptical but wilder things have been known to happen.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  I could alternatively assume that you time travelled with a copy of Grays Sports Almanac.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  I’ve seen some moments of price differences between crypto markets even this year that you could hand-trade for a profit.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago

The insane claims, the failure to provide any proof despite the ease of doing so and the email address at the end tells me this is a scam artist fishing for gullible marks.